


Prompt for Pinkliliflower

by CuratioLethe



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Children, F/M, prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-20
Updated: 2014-05-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 20:11:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1660982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CuratioLethe/pseuds/CuratioLethe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>pinkliliflower asked, "Prompt: 9 runs into an older Rose in a alien market. Rose has a little girl with her that has his eyes and bright pink chucks on."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prompt for Pinkliliflower

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeta'd. All mistakes are mine.

Deltaflax was a planet that had gotten its reputation from streets that were literally paved in gold. It was a profit planet: one that regulated 75% of the universes currency and the roads consisted of  little more than of a  string of merchants, catering to a plethora of needs and offering a variety of goods that couldn’t be found this side of the Medusa Cascade. Not in over three hundred years anyways.   
  
Which was exactly why he was there now; The TARDIS was in desperate need of several replacement parts, the ones being replaced having been cobbled together from various bits and bots several times over and had become so stripped and “thread bare”’ that the time ship had began to refuse certain functions that required the parts. Things like hot water, for instance. (Not in Rose’s room, of course, she still received  plenty of that luxury and at first, the Doctor had thought it was a fluke in his plumbing. That was until Rose offered him her shower, resulting in him being pelted with a freezing spray five minutes in. )

  
The parts hadn’t only been a reason for coming to this planet however, but an excuse to as well. An excuse to have a few hours to himself to search for a birthday gift. According to her timeline, Rose had been traveling with him for over three months now, and in two days time would mark her 20th birthday.   
  
Time lords didn’t celebrate things like birthdays, but the Doctor had been around the human race long enough now that he had caught on to the emphasis they put on the occasion, celebrating the date with cake and presents, (and there was something about bouncy houses and men who dressed up in atrocious attire to perform party tricks) But he had never actually been involved in the event and therefore had decided that a nice gift would have to do Rose just fine and that Jackie would take care of the other domestic aspects of the human tradition. He had dropped Rose off at her mums, telling her he would be around to collect her in three days time.   
  
The sunlight of this planet never got too bright, but shone just enough to cause its pathways to sparkle luminously as customers strode from vendor to vendor at their leisure, a few haggling over a price here and there, but overall everyone seemed to be in pleasant spirits.   
  
The Doctor  made his way from where he had landed in the line of trees and began to first search for the TARDIS parts. It took him a little over an hour to locate what he needed, (and surprisingly without too much of a hassle). Vendors offered him their wares as he passed in velvety, hushed tones intended to persuade and had he been any other alien, he would have been pulled in easily   
  
He passed stalls that sold fruits and scarves made of expensive silk; trinkets in golds and silvers and kretinine that did a range of things from predicting the weather to acting as portable atmospheres.   
He passed up jewelry and beauty potions and small animals intended to be sold as pets or food. The Doctor had nearly made it to the end of the first lane before something actually caught his eyes and by that point he had become so hopelessly frustrated that he had considered simply grabbing a garment and shoving it in a bag to give to her. 

Despite the fact that he had never celebrated a birthday in all of his nine hundred years, he couldn’t stop himself from admitting that her birth was definitely worth celebrating and with that, he wanted to get her something she would cherish, something that was special… as special as she was.  
  
He shook his head sharply, trying to shake the annoying voice in the back of his head that chanted words in his ears like “sentimental” and “domestic”, making him itch to take off running. To get in his TARDIS and spend the next indefinite number of years on the farthest reaches of the galaxy from planet Earth that he could get. 

What was he even doing anyways? What did he hope to accomplish by keeping her along? By keeping her so close and letting her closer still? It was inevitable, inescapable, an undeniable truth that one day she would leave him, one way or another. Maybe it would be in a week, when she realized just how much she missed her normal, human life with her normal human friends and lack of a death threat every other day. Maybe it would be in thirty years time when her human nature took its course and she could no longer keep up with him. But it would happen, and he realized with a grimace  just how much worse it was going to be for him if he kept her along.  

He shook his head almost violently and made his way over to a small tent pitched several feet from the rest. Two poles stood several feet from each other and hanging from a wire between them was what had caught his attention. All he could make out at first was that whatever was hanging caught the sun and shattered prisms across the grass and trees. As he drew near, however he was able to see the crystal cut of several unique ornaments, each small enough to fit in the palm of his hand; each had its own shape and now that he stood closer, he could see that they contained a substance that swirled and danced in its crystal casing as if it were alive. He reached out a hand to touch the center one: it was spherical and twisted to a point at its ends, but just before his fingers grazed the surface a small voice stopped him, a voice that chimed like bells struggling to pronuciate.   
  
"You have to pay for those, sir."  

He turned and  much to his surprise found someone who just reached his waist. Her face was round in youth, but she was a slender child,and if he had to guess, he’d peg her to be five or six years old.

Her skin was porcelain and fair, hair that rested against her shoulders was an almost unnatural shade of blonde that seemed to shimmer in the sun as she moved and despite the fact that nothing about her physical appearance led him to believe she was anything but human, something about her gave him the impression that that wasn’t necessarily the case.   
  
But despite all of that, there was one thing that threw him off above all of that, something that left him slack jawed and staring as they made eye contact. Because staring back at him was a pair of blue eyes-clear, vibrant blue.. 

Under normal circumstances, the Doctor might have shrugged the occurrence off: How many people in the universe had blue eyes?  It was statistically one of the most common among the human race.  

But that would have been under normal circumstances. Because these were anything but normal circumstances. The girls eyes weren’t just the same shade of blue as his own, they were exact in every detail.   
  
It had been common knowledge among his people that each time lord was born with a specific pattern in the iris that never changed with regeneration, even if the eye color did. Sort of like a finger print for humans, it was unique to each and something that tended to go unnoticed less you knew to look for it.   
And he hadn’t really been looking for it, he had just happened to notice it. She not only had his same blue, but a pattern that marked her as being gallifreyian-his own eyes stared back at him.   
  
"…How?"  
  
"D-Doctor?"   
  
He turned his head in the direction that his name had been spoken from and if  he had thought that the surprises for the day had stopped with the girl, he had been sorely mistaken. 

"/Rose/?!"   
  
There she stood not but three feet from him, when he knew for a fact that he had left her back on Earth.   
He stared, and upon further inspection realized that although that it was indeed Rose, it wasn’t /his/ Rose. This one was older, the planes of her face sharpened and defined with age, her hair no longer the bleached blonde that she currently kept it, instead it had darkened to a the color of honey.   
  
She stared back at him, her mouth hanging open slightly and the way that her expression had frozen into sheer shock did something uncomfortable to the pit of his stomach. She stared at him as if.. 

Time had frozen between them as they stared at one another, and then she dropped the box she was holding and stumbled the distance between them. It was automatic, him sliding his arms around her, but it was out of reflex, (and perhaps in response to the way that she gasped as her arms wound around hi neck, as if she hadn’t been breathing before,) that he tightened the hold he had on her. They clung to one another, and the feel of her in his arms was so natural that his brain choked on the memory of the thoughts he had just been having of her.   
  
They stayed that way until he felt the tremble of her body and pulled back to see that she was crying, smiling as tears coursed down her cheeks. He brought a hand to to swipe a few away and she caught it and held it to her face.   
  
"How far into your future am I?" His brow furrowed and the pit of his stomach twisted painfully. Because if this is the reaction she had to seeing him then it was pretty obvious he was no longer around.   
She hiccuped and shook her head, “I probably shouldn’t tell you that.”  
  
As if suddenly remembering they weren’t alone, she pulled back to dry her face with her sleeve before turning back to the girl who looked if not a little confused. Rose kneeled before her and took both of her hands, giving the girl her typical-Rose smile that stretched across her face.   
  
"Aurelia, this is my friend who I just need to have a chat with. Finish hanging up those up for me, yeah?"   
  
"You were crying Is everything alright, mummy?"   
  
The Doctor felt his jaw drop and quickly steadied himself. The girl resembled Rose, sure: but there was an unfamiliar quality to her features that he couldn’t quite pinpoint.   
  
“‘Course love, I just… haven’t seen him in a long while.”   
The girl nodded, glancing at the Doctor before retrieving the box Rose had discarded and dragging it over to the display of ornaments where she opened the box and began to hang more.   
  
A hand slid into his and he tightened his own around it instinctively as they watched the child dressed in a white summer dress and bright pink chucks work meticulously. 

"She’s your daughter then?" 

"Name’s Aurelia… It means-"  
  
“‘The golden one’, It’s latin, yeah? Got something to do with that hair of hers, I take it?” 

”..Not exactly.”  
  
"She’s Gallifreyian, Rose." 

"Half."   
  
"That means…" He swallowed hard and looked at Rose, who was watching the girl move, didn’t respond, and instead squeezing his hand before glancing at him.   
  
"You know I can’t say too much, Doctor. You know that better than anyone…But yes, she is.  And… "A grin stretched across her face. "She’s absolutely fantastic." 

He nodded and swallowed. Questions itched the back of his throat, dying to pour themselves forth, but Rose was right. As it was he already knew far too much. But something about that knowledge loosen a part inside of him he hadn’t even realized had been taut. 

At least the internal debate on whether or not to keep her along seemed to have sorted itself out. He couldn’t deny the relief that sprung to life inside of him at that. Then again, had it ever /really/ been up for discussion? He could argue with himself all he liked, try to rationalize and think up every reason he had for sending her home, but the truth of it was simply that he was far to selfish to ever giver her up.   
  
"I’m sorry, Rose."   
  
She started, taken aback, before her brow furrowed and she leaned against him. “For what?”  
  
"Well, you told her you hadn’t seen me in a while, and she had no clue who I was. I reckon I’m no longer around. So, if I’ve left you, with this-with her, on your own, then something along the lines makes me incredibly stupid and I’m sorry."   
  
The expression that crossed her features could have wounded a colder man than he, but she replaced it easily with a soft smile and rolled her eyes. “Its nothing like that, I promise.  Things worked out for the best- I’ve got her, don’t I? Besides, what do you mean, “along the lines” You’ve had your less than shining moments up ‘til this point, Mister”Rose-I’m-trying-to-resonate-concrete.”  
  
"Oi!"  
  
Her laughter caught Aurelia’s attention, who joined them and held out her hand. The small ornament he had been admiring from before was nestled in her palm. “This is for you.”   
  
"Oh? Thought I had to pay for it, whatever "it’ is?" The Doctor took the small crystal sphere from her, before kneeling down to meet her at eye level.   
  
"It’s called a ‘Moon’s Tear’. It grants wishes to anyone you give it to as a present. But you can’t tell what the wish is, or it won’t come true. Mummy made that one, said she used to have on just like it. So I thought you’d like it."

Rose nodded at the Doctors glance and the Doctor studied the ornament closely before looking up at the girl, /his daughter/. They stared at each other and the Doctor made a promise to himself then and there. Come hell or high water, he’d never leave the two of them, would never leave Rose. He knew there were somethings about the encounter that he was going to have to hide from himself, but that was the one thing he would keep a solid, firm hold on.   
  
"Well, that’s awfully kind of you, miss. Was gonna give this to a friend of mine  for her birthday. She’s pretty special, so I’d want all of her wishes to come true."   
  
A faint blush appeared colored her cheeks as her eyes suddenly lit up.”But today is mummy’s birthday!”  
  
"Funny thing that is, isn’t it?"  The Doctor grinned at Aurelia and then at Rose as realization dawned on her.   
"Must be a pretty special day."   
~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Daddy!"   
  
The Doctor joined Rose as she watched his ninth incarnation walk back to the TARDIS, back to a past that he was currently reliving in his memories alone.    
  
He lifted Aurelia into his arms and spun around with her once, causing her summer dress to flare out around them, before he kissed her forehead and set her back on her feet.   
  
"What took you so long?"   
  
"Sorry love, got caught up. How have we done so far today?"   
  
"Well, we haven”t sold any yet, but I gave one to mummys friend."  
  
"Oh?"  
  
"Mhmm, It was weird though, ‘cause mummy called him "Doctor", but that’s your name, isn’t it?"  
  
"Your mum must just really like that name to have so many friends that share it. "

He met Rose’s questioning glance and simply smiled. 


End file.
